[In the following review, Bunting regards Gemini as a “sizeable achievement” despite its affectations.]

Edith Sitwell says: “A writer to whom the gentle and insipid word ‘talent’ cannot be applied, but a greater word of whose use we are, as a rule, afraid.” In case you inquire for Miss Sitwell's credentials, here they are: “The only modern poet who is completely successful in verse seems to me to be Miss Edith Sitwell”: by John Collier, preface to Gemini. These poems have also been awarded two valuable prizes, so they come well recommended. Finally, they are, it seems, a sort of hail and farewell to verse; the poet stepping into the arena for half a mo', then right out again before the critical wild beasts have time to tear him.

After all these prefatory safeguards, this suspiciously heavy insurance of a not very extensive property (33 pages), and the circumspect disclaimers of the Apology prefixed, the reader is sure to expect a mouse to come out of the mountain, and he will, as was probably calculated, be pleasantly surprised to behold instead quite a moderate-sized rat, maybe something even a size larger. But oh, the affectations of the animal!

Valentine and Orson, Mr. Collier calls himself; Orson the author of Three Men in One Room, Valentine responsible for the shorter poems. Take Orson first. His gait, heroic couplets, ill-suited to his build, stumping dancing-bear-wise around the subject. The subject divided against itself: half moralizings in eighteenth-century pastiche on sordid old-age; half, deeply felt, the misery of thwarted but unrenouncing love, tricked out, certainly, in similar semi-antique cast-offs but not disguised by them. Indeed, the threadbare flutter of antitheses and inversions lends these five pages the awkward pathos of misery that must stammer because it does not know its own cause well enough to cry out sharply. Maybe it was because he saw this that Mr. Collier forebore to rewrite the poem; for in the second half of Three Men in One Room he has stuff for a very fine poem, in a less hampering metre. The satire of strong passions known intimately has always a headlong momentum: Mr. Collier knows it, and specifically recognizes that his poem is “at war with the medium”; but he takes the medium to be verse itself, not merely the wrong sort of verse. Quotation is useless, the poem is too through-and-through crippled; and the satire is sometimes forced, sometimes frivolous. Curse the habit of taking attitudes, it has robbed us of something moving and memorable.

Valentine is warier. He watches his step. He does not fall into the toils of great emotions and he chooses his metre sapiently. A man moving in the half-light, speaking in the half-tones of culture, always in the absence, in the poignant—maybe—memory of emotion:

Lost past! for even gaining a more clear
Image, a photograph, one finds at most
(As floats in a dim green bath a single coarse hair)
Alien impertinence, a ghost
Claiming relation. …

Never in contact with the actual:

More voices in waves than streets
More tongues in trees than men,
And no ear in which to name his grief
Anew, to form it and bind it again.

In such a mood or its aftermath one hopes to see at last

                                        the frail flowering of the heart, its lonely
Fugitive poem heard in the quiet when words die—
This only is I. …

But it evades us, for in reality the flowering of the heart takes place in the storm mishandled by Orson a few pages back.

It is not supposable that Orson would always flounder in metres ill-chosen. If Mr. Collier really has abandoned verse we have lost a fine poet. We cannot regard His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp as a fair swop for the poems the coalescence of Valentine and Orson should produce. The affectations are, after all, superficial, and even in this small volume we have, for this age, quite a sizeable achievement.